by Jennifer Tilton

How do you tell the difference between a “good kid” and a “potential thug”? In Dangerous or Endangered?, Jennifer Tilton considers the ways in which children are increasingly viewed as dangerous and yet, simultaneously, as endangered and in need of protection by the state.
Tilton draws on three years of ethnographic research in Oakland, California, one of the nation’s most racially diverse cities, to examine how debates over the nature and needs of young people have fundamentally reshaped politics, transforming ideas of citizenship and the state in contemporary America. As parents and neighborhood activists have worked to save and discipline young people, they have often inadvertently reinforced privatized models of childhood and urban space, clearing the streets of children, who are encouraged to stay at home or in supervised after-school programs. Youth activists protest these attempts, demanding a right to the city and expanded rights of citizenship.
Dangerous or Endangered? pays careful attention to the intricate connections between fears of other people’s kids and fears for our own kids in order to explore the complex racial, class, and gender divides in contemporary American cities.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2010; 203p.

By Carl Gutierrez-Jones

The beating of Rodney King, the killing of Amadou Diallo, and the LAPD Rampart Scandal: these events have been interpreted by the courts, the media and the public in dramatically conflicting ways. Critical Race Narratives examines what is at stake in these conflicts and, in so doing, rethinks racial strife in the United States as a highly-charged struggle over different methods of reading and writing. Focusing in particular on the practice and theorization of narrative strategies, Gutiérrez-Jones engages many of the most influential texts in the recent race debates including The Bell Curve, America in Black and White, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, and The Mismeasure of Man. In the process, Critical Race Narratives pursues key questions posed by the texts as they work within, or against, disciplinary expectations: can critical engagements with narrative enable a more democratic dialogue regarding race? what promise does such experimentation hold for working through the traumatic legacy of racism in the United States? Throughout, Critical Race Narratives initiates a timely dialogue between race-focused narrative experiment in scholarly writing and similar work in literary texts and popular culture.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2001.

By Paul Harris

In 1971, Paul Harris pioneered the modern version of the black rage defense when he successfully defended a young black man charged with armed bank robbery. Dubbed one of the most novel criminal defenses in American history by Vanity Fair, the black rage defense is enormously controversial, frequently dismissed as irresponsible, nothing less than a harbinger of anarchy. Consider the firestorm of protest that resulted when the defense for Colin Ferguson, the gunman who murdered numerous passengers on a New York commuter train, claimed it was considering a black rage defense.

In this thought-provoking book, Harris traces the origins of the black rage defense back through American history, recreating numerous dramatic trials along the way. For example, he recounts in vivid detail how Clarence Darrow, defense attorney in the famous Scopes Monkey trial, first introduced the notion of an environmental hardship defense in 1925 while defending a black family who shot into a drunken white mob that had encircled their home.

Emphasizing that the black rage defense must be enlisted responsibly and selectively, Harris skillfully distinguishes between applying an environmental defense and simply blaming society, in the abstract, for individual crimes. If Ferguson had invoked such a defense, in Harris's words, it would have sent a superficial, wrong-headed, blame-everything-on-racism message. Careful not to succumb to easy generalizations, Harris also addresses the possibilities of a white rage defense and the more recent phenomenon of cultural defenses. He illustrates how a person's environment can, and does, affect his or her life and actions, how even the most rational person can become criminally deranged, when bludgeoned into hopelessness by exploitation, racism, and relentless poverty.

New York; London: NYU Press, 1996. 306p.

By John Tehranian

Middle Easterners: Sometimes White, Sometimes Not - an article by John Tehranian
The Middle Eastern question lies at the heart of the most pressing issues of our time: the war in Iraq and on terrorism, the growing tension between preservation of our national security and protection of our civil rights, and the debate over immigration, assimilation, and our national identity. Yet paradoxically, little attention is focused on our domestic Middle Eastern population and its place in American society. Unlike many other racial minorities in our country, Middle Eastern Americans have faced rising, rather than diminishing, degrees of discrimination over time; a fact highlighted by recent targeted immigration policies, racial profiling, a war on terrorism with a decided racialist bent, and growing rates of job discrimination and hate crime. Oddly enough, however, Middle Eastern Americans are not even considered a minority in official government data. Instead, they are deemed white by law.
In Whitewashed, John Tehranian combines his own personal experiences as an Iranian American with an expert’s analysis of current events, legal trends, and critical theory to analyze this bizarre Catch-22 of Middle Eastern racial classification. He explains how American constructions of Middle Eastern racial identity have changed over the last two centuries, paying particular attention to the shift in perceptions of the Middle Easterner from friendly foreigner to enemy alien, a trend accelerated by the tragic events of 9/11. Focusing on the contemporary immigration debate, the war on terrorism, media portrayals of Middle Easterners, and the processes of creating racial stereotypes, Tehranian argues that, despite its many successes, the modern civil rights movement has not done enough to protect the liberties of Middle Eastern Americans.
By following how concepts of whiteness have transformed over time, Whitewashed forces readers to rethink and question some of their most deeply held assumptions about race in American society.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2008. 250p.

By The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights

FRA’s second ‘Being Black in the EU’ report highlights experiences of people of African descent in the EU.

It shows that, despite binding anti-discrimination law in the EU since 2000 and significant policy developments since then, people of African descent continue to face racism, discrimination and hate crime:

• Racial discrimination – 45% of respondents say they experienced racial discrimination in the 5 years before the survey, an increase compared to 39% in FRA’s last survey. In Germany and Austria, it goes over 70%. Most often, they are discriminated against when looking for work or searching for accommodation. Young people and people with higher education are most affected. Yet, discrimination remains invisible as only 9% report it.

• Harassment – 30% say they experienced racist harassment but almost no one reports it. Young women, people with higher education and those wearing religious clothing are more likely to be racially harassed.

• Racial profiling – 58% say that their most recent police stop in the year before the survey was a result of racial profiling. Those who perceive their stop as racial profiling trust the police much less.

• Work – 34% felt racially discriminated against when looking for a job and 31% at work in the 5 years before the survey. Compared to people generally, they are more likely to have only temporary contracts and are over-qualified for their job.

• Housing and poverty – rising inflation and cost of living have put more people of African descent at higher risk of poverty, compared to the general population. Some 33% face difficulties to make ends meet and 14% cannot afford to keep their house warm, compared with 18% and 7% of people generally. Simply finding a place to live is a struggle for many, with 31% saying they were racially discriminated against when trying to find accommodation.

• Education – young people of African descent are three times more likely to leave school early, compared to young people generally. More parents in 2022 say that their children experienced racism at school than in 2016.

  To tackle racism and discrimination effectively, FRA calls on EU countries to:

• properly enforce anti-discrimination legislation as well as effective, proportionate and dissuasive sanctions;

• identify and record hate crimes, and consider bias motivation as an aggravating circumstance when determining

• penalties;

• collect equality data, including on ‘ethnic or racial origin’ to assess the situation and monitor progress;

• ensure that equality bodies have the necessary mandates and resources to tackle discrimination and support victims;

• take steps to prevent and eradicate discriminatory institutional practices and culture in policing, drawing on FRA’s guide on preventing unlawful profiling;

• develop specific policies to address racism and racial discrimination in education, employment, housing and healthcare.

This report is part of FRA’s third EU-wide survey looking at experiences of immigrants and descendants of immigrants across the EU.

It analyses the responses of over 6,700 people of African descent living in 13 EU countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

Vienna, Austria: European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2023. 8p.

By Katie Zafft, et al.

In September 2022, the City of Duluth, with input from Duluth’s Racial Bias Audit Team (RBAT), contracted with the Crime and Justice Institute (CJI) to conduct a racial bias audit of the Duluth Police Department (DPD). CJI collaborated with the community and the Department to provide a holistic and comprehensive assessment of Department operations and interactions with the community with respect to the concerns raised about racial and ethnic disparities in police practices and operations. The scope of the audit largely reflects the status of the Department and experiences of community members within the past five years. Assessments of policies and trainings mainly represent the most recent versions of materials unless the audit team was provided materials that were previously used. The City/RBAT identified the following project scope in their request for services: • “Assess, monitor, and assist the DPD in concert with the community to uncover any aspects of implicit bias, as well as systemic and individual racial bias. • Assess the impact of enforcement operations on historically marginalized and discriminated against populations. • Provide recommendations for reforms that improve community-oriented policing practices, transparency, professionalism, non-discriminatory practices, accountability, community inclusion, effectiveness, equity and public trust. These recommendations should also consider statutory requirements, national best practices and current scientifically valid methodology, and community expectations. • Engage the community and employees of DPD to understand both experiences and expectations of interactions between both groups.”1 Assessment Goals and Objectives The scope of the audit, as directed by the audit goals developed by the Racial Bias Audit Team, focuses on eleven items that we consider to be three distinct areas of work: Department operations, Department interactions with the community, and the role of the Duluth Citizen Review Board (DCRB).

Boston: Crime and Justice Institute, 2023. 90p.

By Chandra Childers

Summary: Southern politicians claim that “business-friendly” policies lead to an abundance of jobs and economic prosperity for all Southerners. The data actually show a grim economic reality.

Key findings

The share of prime-age workers (ages 25–54) who have a job is lower than the national average in most Southern states.

• Median earnings in nine Southern states are among the lowest in the nation, even after adjusting for lower cost of living in the South.

• Poverty rates in most Southern states are above the national average. In Louisiana and Mississippi, nearly 1 in 5 residents live in poverty.

• The child poverty rate in the South is 20.9%—higher than in any other region.

These statistics reflect an anti-worker economic model whose signature policies are low wages, low taxes, few regulations on businesses, few labor protections, a weak safety net, and vicious opposition to unions.

Why this matters

A long history of anti-worker policies in the South—rooted in a racist agenda—has had devastating consequences for its residents. Business interests and the wealthy have stoked racial divisions to maintain power and ensure access to cheap labor—at the expense of working people.

How to fix it

We must begin to reverse 150 years of anti-worker policymaking in the South—starting with raising minimum wages and protecting workers’ right to organize. We also need to enforce appropriate regulations on business practices, reform a broken tax structure, and strengthen the safety net for Southerners.

The Impacts of Implicit Bias Awareness Training in the NYPD

By Robert E. Worden, Sarah J. McLean, Robin S. Engel, Hannah Cochran, Nicholas Corsaro, Danielle Reynolds ,Cynthia J. Najdowski, Gabrielle T. Isaza

In February of 2018, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) began inservice training on implicit bias for its 36,000 sworn personnel, using the Fair and Impartial Policing (FIP) curriculum. A team of researchers from the John Finn Institute for Public Safety and the IACP/UC Center for Police Research and Policy partnered with the NYPD to conduct evaluation research on the impacts of the training. The evaluation concentrated on the effects of the training among patrol officers assigned to commands in the Patrol Services Bureau, Transit Bureau, and Housing Bureau, whose training commenced in May, 2018 and concluded in April, 2019. We assessed the immediate effects of the training on officers’ beliefs and attitudes: their knowledge about the science of implicit bias and the potential implications for policing, and their attitudes about the salience of bias and discrimination as a social problem, and the importance of policing without prejudice. A survey was administered on the day of FIP training, either prior to or following the training on alternating days. We drew inferences about immediate training effects from the differences in pre- and post-training survey responses. The effect of the training on officers’ knowledge about implicit bias was of moderate magnitude, though many officers’ comprehension of the science of bias was limited. The effects of the training on officers’ attitudes toward discrimination, and their motivation to act without prejudice, were fairly small, though prior to the training, most officers considered discrimination a social problem and felt individually motivated to act without bias. Officers regarded the training as beneficial: 70 percent reportedly gained a better understanding of implicit bias and more than two-thirds reportedly learned new strategies and skills that they expected to apply to their work. Nearly half rated the likelihood of using all five biasmanagement strategies as either a 6 or 7 on a 7-point scale anchored at 7 as ‘very likely.’ We conducted a follow-up survey about officers’ beliefs and attitudes and their actual utilization of FIP strategies, which was administered from June through August of 2019, ranging from 2 to 13 months following the training. Asked whether they attempted “to apply the FIP training in your duties over the last month,” 42 percent said they had not, 31 percent said they attempted to use the bias-management strategies sometimes, and 27 percent said they attempted using them frequently. Comparing the follow-up survey responses to those on the days of training, we also detected some decay in the immediate effects of the training on officers’ comprehension of the science of implicit bias. The impact of police training is likely to be greater when it is supported by other organizational forces, of which immediate supervisors may be the most important. We surveyed sergeants post-training. We found that most sergeants view monitoring for bias as one of their responsibilities, and that they are willing to intervene as needed with individual officers. One-quarter reported that they had intervened with an officer whose performance warranted intervention. Slightly more than half of the sergeants reportedly address issues of implicit bias during roll calls, thereby reinforcing the training. Insofar as officers’ unconscious biases may influence their enforcement decisions, and to the extent that officers apply their training in FIP strategies to manage their unconscious biases, we hypothesized that the training would lead to reductions in racial/ethnic disparities in enforcement actions, including stops, frisks, searches, arrests, summonses, and uses of force. We examined enforcement disparities at multiple levels of analysis – at the aggregate level of commands and the level of individual enforcement events. To isolate the effect of the training from other factors, the NYPD adhered to a protocol for a randomized controlled trial that provided for grouping commands into clusters scheduled for training by random assignment. This experimental control was supplemented by statistical controls in the analytical models. Overall, we found insufficient evidence to conclude that racial and ethnic disparities in police enforcement actions were reduced as a result of the training. It is very difficult to isolate the effects of the training from other forces that produce disparate enforcement outcomes. Training impacts might be a signal that is easily lost in the noise of everyday police work. Estimating the effect of a single training curriculum on officers’ decisions to invoke the law or otherwise exercise police authority may well be akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Furthermore, it has been presumed but not demonstrated that enforcement disparities stem, at least in part, from officers’ implicit biases. Though research has shown that police officers, like the general public, hold unconscious biases, no scientific evidence directly links officers’ implicit bias with enforcement disparities. To the contrary, the evidence – which is thin, to be sure – suggests that officers practice controlled responses even without implicit bias training. If disparities stem from forces other than implicit bias, then even a welldesigned training that is flawlessly delivered cannot be expected to alter patterns of police enforcement behavior.

Albany, NY: John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety, Inc , 2020. 188p.

By Jonathan Hsy

How do marginalized communities across the globe use the medieval past to combat racism, educate the public, and create a just world? Jonathan Hsy advances urgent academic and public conversations about race and appropriations of the medieval past in popular culture and the arts. Examining poetry, fiction, journalism, and performances, Hsy shows how cultural icons such as Frederick Douglass, Wong Chin Foo, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Sui Sin Far reinvented medieval traditions to promote social change. Contemporary Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and multiracial artists embrace diverse pasts to build better futures. “Makes the crucial move of tying medievalism studies readings to social and racial justice work explicitly … innovative and greatly needed in the field.” Seeta Chaganti, author of Strange Footing “A major accomplishment that belongs on the shelves of every person who believes in antiracism.” Geraldine Heng, author of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

Leeds, UK:  Arc Humanities Press,, 2021. 180p.

By Alexandra Cox

There are stark racial and ethnic disparities which exist at all levels of the English and Welsh criminal justice systems (Lammy, 2017, Sveinsson, 2012, Chada, 2020). These disparities exist at the front end of the system in terms of the racially and ethnically disproportionate impact of stop and search; the racialised placement of individuals on police databases such as the Metropolitan Police’s Gangs Matrix; decision-making by magistrates and judges; and the barriers that people of colour face in accessing the legal profession, and, in particular, the judiciary (Williams and Clarke, 2016, Fatsis, 2019, Densley and Pyrooz, 2019, Centre for Justice Innovation, 2017, Gibbs and Kirby, 2014, The Law Society, 2020b).1 Defence practitioners can offer vital insights about criminal justice system practices as they are court ‘insiders’, with unprecedented access to legal procedures, negotiations, and practices, as well as access to legal cultures and cultural codes which are inherently racialised. They also have valuable knowledge about their clients’ lives and experiences in the system. However, this knowledge is rarely harnessed, despite the ways that it can be brought to bear in support of better outcomes for clients. Frontline legal practitioners also offer perspectives on the legitimacy of the justice system, both as individuals who have their own experiences of injustice, but also through an understanding of their clients’ experiences. There has been very little research on defence practitioners’ perceptions of the fairness of the criminal justice system landscape in England and Wales. Much of the research on defence practitioners has focused on the relationships that are established between practitioners and their clients and the role of trust in those relationships, and has been almost exclusively conducted in the United States (Flemming, 1986, Boccaccini et al., 2004, Sandys and Pruss, 2017, Campbell et al., 2015, Clair, 2020). There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that the experiences of lawyers of colour in the justice system in England and Wales are shaped by the dynamics of race, class and gender (Wilson, 2020, Johnson, 2020), and that their perspectives provide valuable insights into the working practices of the courts, but there is very little research evidence about these perspectives.

London: Howard League for Penal Reform, 2023. 11p.